Botany Lesson

by Lillian Necakov


The world asleep in the wolf moon’s arms
March already here, again at 5am
and I am not asleep thinking
about the woman who died
under Pennsylvania Avenue under a bridge
that was her own private heaven and
sometimes trickster

Angela at 5am walking gently off this earth
while the botanist talks to her trees
in the forest hospital
cooing to the balsam fir, sassafras, oak
you are a book not yet written
she whispers
p-i-k-o-w-a-h-t-i-k

robins at 5am stitching together a song
from snow-melt, pine needle, sapwood
against cold-morning skin
I am thinking about the zoologist’s
long arms catching every leaf falling
to pleat into a dead woman’s hair
underpass eulogy
the colour of apricot.


* * * * *

Lillian Necakov is the author of six books of poetry, numerous chapbooks, broadsides and leaflets. Her new book il virus is forthcoming from Anvil Press (A Feed Dog Book) in April 2021. In 2016, her chapbook The Lake Contains an Emergency Room was shortlisted for bpNichol chapbook award. During the 1980s she ran a micro press called “The Surrealist Poets Gardening Association” and sold her books on Toronto’s Yonge Street. She ran the Boneshaker Reading series from 2010-2020. She lives in Toronto and just might be working on a new book.